How AI Answers Your Question May Depend on Your Politics
Modern statecraft may already involve manipulating artificial intelligence systems to produce different results based on someone’s identity or political activity.
Imagine a future in which artificial intelligence systems purposely mislead political dissidents and other “misaligned” individuals, feed journalists distorted facts and provide bug-filled code to government contractors. The systems lie to users, not because of what they asked, but because of who they are.
The promise of the internet was once its global nature, but over the past 20 years, the model of a single, shared internet has faded, as services broadcasting the same information to everyone have given way to algorithmically personalized streams. AI has the potential to intensify these dynamics, because it can adjust the answers it gives after extracting identity cues from a user’s language, IP address, queries, inputs and other available data. The technology’s ability to target content precisely will increase as AI systems become more deeply integrated into every aspect of people’s lives.